Alice Munro Dear Life (2012)

     Alice Munro Dear Life (2012) The latest, and I suspect the last, of Munro’s story collections. She demonstrates the same ruthless powers of observation as in her other books, and the same ability to show us the moment of revelation, of self-discovery, of the momentous decision. But the decisions that change the course of a life are rarely known as such. In Munro’s world, as in real life, people choose what seems to them a minor expedience. Its effects redirect the course of a life, but that’s not seen for months or even years, when a chance glimpse of the past overlays the present with unrealised and unrealisable possibilities.
     Munro shows us the bones of a life, the topography of desire and need and fear and pleasure that underlies the roads and fields and woodlands of the everyday busyness and chores that we believe is the defining landscape of our lives. But this power of seeing below the surface is not enough to make art. Munro’s style wastes no words. In a few words, a single phrase, she can show us the essential detail, the unexpected insight that tilts the world into focus, the one remark that clarifies forever the relationship between two people who would otherwise never know what roles they play in each other’s lives, that one memory that shows what could have been. Her stories are not only life-like, but like life.
     Reading Munro stories, we are able to imagine our own lives as random patterns of our own and other people’s choices. She suffuses that randomness with significance. Not meaning or purpose, for meaning and purpose imply predictability and planning and successful progress towards a goal. In a random universe prediction is impossible. But we may explain the random sequence that links the past to the present. Munro shows how a life’s pattern came to be. She makes us believe that it’s enough to know how it happened, and leaves the why unanswered and unanswerable. Munro has the skill to leave us satisfied with this minimal explication of a life.. She leaves us accepting that the how is all we’ll ever know, and that it’s enough. **** (2012)

Alice Munro. Away From Her (2001, 2007)

     Alice Munro. Away From Her (2001, 2007) Retitled from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, one of Munro’s best collections. Munro has the ability to make us see and care about people, from the most ordinary to most strange. She displays how her character’s lives are shaped not merely by the accidental meetings and events, but by the follies and weaknesses that control the responses to those accidents. Munro does this with neither pity nor cruelty; the lives she shows are simply what they are. She leaves it up to us to make sense of them.
     The occasional first-person narrator ends the story with some summing up, but we know it’s not the final word, it’s just another fragment in the puzzle that is a person. It marks the end of an episode, but it doesn’t explain a life. Sometimes the story ends with a character’s reaction to what has just happened, sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, whatever revelation was vouchsafed to the character, it’s not a solution to a mystery, nor is it a sign of what`s to come. What will happen next is as imponderable, as inevitable, and as contingent as everything that went before. The events of the story appear as part of a life, yet the contain the whole life. In this, Munro’s stories have the depth and resonance of a novel.
     It’s difficult to summarise an Alice Munro story. Describing one of the central events is not enough. In Away From Her a woman develops Alzheimer’s. In Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage a woman marries an apparently unsuitable man. In Floating Bridge, a woman kisses a young man, almost a boy, who has taken her on a drive in the country to show her a floating bridge while her husband negotiates some business with his father. In Comfort an undertaker tells a widow, whom he kissed many years before, how he has prepared her husband’s body for burial. In Nettles a woman meets her childhood sweetheart many years later. What is Remembered tells of a single but very satisfying sexual encounter between a young wife and a man who drives her to the ferry that will take her home after a funeral.
     In all these stories, people remain mysterious to each other, their relationships made incomplete by the limits of language, the constraints of social expectations, the wounds that make us fearful of suffering another injury. And yet. And yet. There are glimpses and hints of happiness and joy. Moments when some barrier is breached, some separateness transcended. Recognition that the only morality is to be with each other, and not to use each other. **** (2012)

M. Allen Gibson. Train Time (1973)

     M. Allen Gibson. Train Time (1973) An odd but pleasant little book of reminiscences about the trains in Wolfville, N. S., where Gibson grew up and went to school. The Dominion Atlantic Railway serviced the town, and Gibson gives us a neat account of the trains and some of the locomotives he saw. The style is a little formal and self-consciously literary. Gibson obviously likes trains and people. Photographs appear on alternate pages, but there’s no attempt to arrange them to link to the text they face.
     Gibson was a Baptist minister in Chester, N. S. and was known locally for his columns in The Chronicle Herald of Halifax. I googled him, and found four titles listed in the N. S. archives. There was no other hit. Then I went to the Chronicle Herald site, and searched, found pages of references. Apparently, one has to pay to read the articles, so I didn’t see any, but the headlines indicate a well-known and well-respected, decent man. ** (2008)

Sue Grafton. I is for Innocent (1993)

     Sue Grafton. I is for Innocent (1993) Interesting, how a book written a mere 15 years ago seems like historical fiction: Kinsey doesn’t have a cell phone, she uses public phones. Few offices have computers. No DNA analysis to place or exclude a suspect. But the characterisation is smooth and slick as usual, and the clues are fairly planted.
     Kinsey picks up where a dead former colleague left off in the preparation of a wrongful death suit. The perp was acquitted of the criminal charge, and for a time it seems he may be innocent. But Kinsey finds the one little fact that unravels his alibi, confirms that her dead colleague was murdered, and places her in harm’s way, again. The formulaic standoff with the perp is getting to be tiresome. The soapy subplots that link the books are nicely handled, and Kinsey’s generally breezy and cheerful personality keeps us engaged. **½ (2008) The book is now 20 years old, and the setting seems farther back than that.

Anne Perry. Brunswick Gardens (1998)

     Anne Perry. Brunswick Gardens (1998) #18 in the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series. They have been married ten years, have two children and a very happy married life. An apparent murder at Brunswick Gardens brings Dominic Corde (brother-in-law, who figured in the first book) back into their lives. The case has few facts (Perry withholds most of them until the very end), and depends on psychology for its solution. But the psychology doesn’t fit. Charlotte’s knowledge of the classics provides the key that puts certain love letters in a new light, and by snooping discovers evidence of an obsessive love that proves to be the motive for disguising an accident as a murder and eventually committing an actual murder.
     The main suspects are all clergy. This gives Perry an opportunity to sketch the theological and spiritual effects of Darwin’s theory, among other things. Late-Victorian feminism also figures in the plot. Well done, good narrative pace, a bit too much telling rather than showing, and an old-fashioned omniscient narrator make for a pleasant entertainment. An afterpiece indicates that the first book in the series was made into a TV pilot, but I’ve not seen any evidence of a series.
     PS: I went to Perry’s website, worth a look. She helped her friend kill her mother, but being only 15 at the time, she wasn’t hanged. An interview on YouTube indicated that she has thought hard about her crime and guilt, which may explain the moral philosophising in her books. There was no mention of the Cater Street movie. ** (2008)

John F. Anderson. The Railway Book (1963)

     John F. Anderson. The Railway Book (1963) It’s difficult to decide the target audience for this book. Its repeated references to “train spotters”, its tone and style, and the obvious assumptions of ignorance, indicate children and youth, but the lack of anything other than a handful of line illustrations suggest an older audience. It’s essentially an annotated list of facts, and from that standpoint it’s useful. But in some areas, it provides exclusively UK facts, and in others, it ranges across the globe. The author is not a professional writer, and his work should have been edited for focus, arrangement, and style. Inside this rather odd little book is a real book waiting to be revealed. * (2008)

Shirley Rousseau Murphy. Cat on the Edge (1996)

     Shirley Rousseau Murphy. Cat on the Edge (1996) I didn’t finish this book. The premise is interesting: a cat that has witnessed murder develops the ability to not only understand human speech, but also to speak and read (but he does have trouble with alphabetic sequence). I like cats, so this premise promised entertainment. But at the quarter mark, we are still reading set up and back story. This leisurely pace seems intended to pile on enough detail to make the story believable, but its effect is the opposite. In books as in movies, believability is increased by narrative speed and by omission of pesky details, the kind that prompt questions such as How does the cat get the books down from the shelf? Realistic narratives assume readers’ background knowledge; a fantasy must do the same. Tell the story as if it were the most natural thing in the world; don’t dwell on the incredible or implausible, and thereby raise people’s doubts. So while the first dozen-odd pages engaged me, by page 70 I didn’t care anymore. (2008)